Tips to get access to the real decision makers
By Pascal Persyn on September 01, 2009 @ 08:54
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Tags: , buyer-aligned messaging, funnel managment, know your customer, Sales effectiveness, Sales management, sales skills, sales tactics, solution selling
I’ve seen and heard it over and over again. It’s difficult to get access to real decision makers. It’s even more difficult to keep them in the loop.
Entering late in the buying cycle is probably the single most important reason. A project manager is taking the lead once an opportunity is in the closed minded phase (in some businesses when the RFQ/RFP has been send out). This means that all requirements have been gathered and translated into buying criteria. Therefore real decision makers and those faced with the business problem are no longer involved in the market research phase. They will of course come back into the loop at decision time but that’s way to late to build a meaningful relationship for this opportunity.
5 tips to help overcome the main obstacles:
- Research the power structure and contact the highest ranked person faced with the business problem:Marketing should influence all decision makers faced with business problems you can solve. See: how to influence key decision makers And the one with the biggest impact should be contacted by sales to make an appointment based on a value proposition adapted to the business problem you want to discuss. They will only accept an appointment if their ‘readiness to buy’ is far enough developed but not yet to the state that they’re already convinced to know the buying criteria the solution must meet.
- Speak their language: Sales people are often pushed down or don’t get access to them because they’re unable to have a value add business conversation. Decision makers are not interested in a product or technology pitch. Nor are they interested in knowing more about your company. Remember: Decision-makers believe they know the destination but they have a problem getting there.
- Understand the psychology: Your contact will probably have cold feet of introducing you higher up in the organisation. They’re not sales people and therefore be reluctant to sell the idea to their boss. Afraid of the impact in case of a wrong judgement or setting up an appointment with a sales rep that doesn’t speak the right language.
- Get agreement on value chain impact: Showing that the business pain has an important impact on other key people in the organisation will help you to get access even higher in the organisation. the reasons are:
- You helped your contact to build the needed story to sell the appointment
- You proofed that you understand and have experience dealing with the business problem
- You proofed that you speak the right language.
- Negotiate access: You have to negotiate access if all of above has been insufficient to get access. Remember to check the status of the opportunity in terms of readiness to buy. All of above will probably fail if you came in via the project manger or buyer because the opportunity is already too far down the buying cycle. So if you came in at the right time you will get access when agreeing on certain work or commitments from your side that are of value to your contact in exchange for that meeting.
Closing tip: Be careful with your forecast if you put in opportunities without having access to the real decision makers. These opportunities will drag on and on in your pipeline. Quit normal of course since you have very little insight and control over the ‘real decision’.
How to influence buyers early in their buying cycle
By Pascal Persyn on May 25, 2009 @ 18:54
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Tags: , buyer-aligned messaging, demand generation, lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing and sales alignment, marketing tools, SEO
In today’s world people are using the Internet to research and get smart even before they are willing to see a sales rep.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that a B2B marketer is using all tools at his/her disposal to educate the market in the early stages of the buying cycle. Doing so, should enable you to influence your target market based on your strengths. The prospect should seek your leadership by the time they’re willing to see a sales rep.
Being top of mind and perceived as being ‘different’ requires lead nurturing in which the Internet plays an important role.
Your website needs to combine the following:
- of course the traditional features and benefits but also deliver pain-based an educational content
- explain the impact of your solution and the capabilities it will enable for the customer
- explain the problem and capabilities looked from the different impacted roles in a organization. Have a look at the Protime (HR solution) website to see an example of role-based information
- the ‘about us’ should include the value proposition to your specific targeted market
- use compelling personalized landing pages in combination with email marketing in order to attract traffic to your website.
People will stay longer on your website, visit more pages and support your queeste to be perceived as a thought leader.
2 final notes:
- Use search engine optimization in order for prospects to find your content via search engines
- Make sure you balance the goal of capturing contact information and the risk of capturing up to 75% less registrations. So ask only the ‘really’ necessary information. You should also give the basic information without registration in order to allow search engines to find your content.
Typical sales management traps and how to avoid them
By Pascal Persyn on April 24, 2009 @ 10:46
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Tags: , buyer-aligned messaging, competence development, DNA and corporate culture, Sales management, Sales training, value discipline
Trap 1 – choosing skills over values:
Many managers ignore the value of corporate DNA; The set of values which are the common denominator of all people in the company, required attitudes and value discipline. They rather go for the candidates with the best skills on their curriculum. Skills can be thought. Choosing DNA-match above skills-match will make sure you have the right people on board for the future. It will enable management to focus on customers and business challenges rather than on managing people and their behavior.
Trap 2 – neglecting training and development:
Dirk Verhaeghe told me that his first sales manager once told him: ‘If you think training is expensive, try ignorance’. Many managers tend to think of training as very expensive in money and time (keeping sales people away from customers);
Tip: However, I look at training as an investment; an investment with both short term and long term ROI. Appreciation for the investment in their development. Motivation of your staff. Long term, training & development will make them better performers. Nobody is born a top performer, not in any discipline in life be it sports, business or art. We all need to exercise and train to become better. Sales people need to be continuously trained on:
• Skills (right skills to talk to decision makers)
• The customers environment
• The value proposition and your solution portfolio (pains, capabilities, ROI, enablers, differentiation and benefits)
Must do: Make sure you have an experience sharing platform where best practices are created and kept up to date, experiences are shared, etc…
Trap 3 – quick revenue panic:
When under pressure, a lot of managers tend to turn to tactical stand-alone actions to bring in quick revenue and squeeze their pipeline. Needless to say, that lot’s of stand-alone actions creates de-focus, lowers people engagement and will cause more pain than gain.
Tip:
- Narrow your focus;
- Dominate your market;
- Choose your battles;
- Have a balanced pipeline;
- Support your people.
Trap 4 – Specialists are the best managers for specialists:
A mistake often made is to promote the best performing account manager into the role of sales managers. This is never the best way to maximizing your potential. It takes a different skill-set to be a good manager.
Tip: Promote an account manager choosing or ready for a managerial role in another department to take on a first management experience rather than promoting them to sales manager.
Trap 5 – hiring a sales person to do a marketing job and much more:
In many companies sales are asked to:
- Seek the right prospect;
- Build the right pitch;
- Know the market
- Know the competition
- Know the full product portfolio
- Be experts in called calling
- Draft their own proposals
- Close deals
- Keep a long term relation
Obviously very few people are capable of doing all these things.
Tip: Create a marketing function and a support environment build upon best practices and have sales focus on developing qualified leads, closing deals and/or develop existing accounts.
In other words build a scalable organisation!
How to be a topnotch B2B marketer part I
By Pascal Persyn on March 31, 2009 @ 12:35
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Tags: , B2B marketing, buyer-aligned messaging, know your customer, marketing and sales alignment, marketing effectivenes, Sales effectiveness, top-line growth
10 must do’s: (Part I, 1 – 5)
- Visit your customers: The best way to know your market is visiting customers and prospects. Research done by Micheal Treacy shows that “Watching what the customers actually do is more reliable than listening to what they say”. Don’t rely on market research.
- Talk to the users
- Understand what problems they were faced with prior to be enabled by your solution
- Be able to quantify the situation before and after
- Write a half-page pain-based reference story in bullet format from the perspective of each impacted “role” in the company to be used by sales when they speak to these people.
- Segment the market based on your differentiation:you can read more on segmentation in a previous blogpost: Segmentation: increase the hit-rate and lower the cost of sales
- Educate the market: Building content deliverables such as white-papers, case studies, etc.. are the best tools in the quest to become top of mind. These deliverables should use the valuable information gathered during your prospect and customer visits. Don’t talk about your product/services or their benefits but rather explain a recognizable situation as is and a situation to be.
- Support Sales:One of your key roles is to facilitate sales’ ability to sell with the highest possible margin at the lowest possible cost of sales. Above mentioned deliverables are also key in helping your sales collegues to better understand their market. Work with them to build face2face best practices that work. You’re in the pivotal position to create and maintain an experience sharing platform.
- Study your competitors:Focus on their strengths not on their weaknesses and make sure you educate your internal and external customers on your differentiation not on your competitors. I see to many competitive reports and presentations leading to: ” We can do what they do and even better”. This makes your strategy to become defensive and positions you as a follower rather then a leader.
Don’t miss Part II, must-do’s 6-10 on “How to be a topnotch B2B marketer”
Segmentation: increase the hit-rate and lower the cost of sales
By Pascal Persyn on February 16, 2009 @ 21:36
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Tags: , buyer-aligned messaging, cost of sales, marketing and sales alignment, segmentation, solution selling
Companies have been doing their segmentation based on industry verticals for several decades. Vertical knowledge as a key differentiator has been added into the equation in a more recent history. Yet not all companies in a vertical are faced with the same problems and priorities at the same time. All of this has led to some important inefficiencies.
- People had to be trained on specific vertical knowledge and product knowledge leading to long ramp up times for people in a multi offering company
- Sales & Marketing facing difficulty to match specific needs in a vertical to the product offering
- Sub optimal Product/technology innovation due to conflicts in priorities
- Product releases not adapted to market readiness leading to a high cost of sales and low hit-rate
- A frustrated sales force and an unhealthy tension between departments because their concerns are left unanswered by management
- Sales loosing a lot of time in finding the “needle in a haystack” prospects
A lack of “scalability” throughout the entire value chain is the root cause . The impact on scalability of an organization should be taken into account in each decision you take.
Let me propose how to use segmentation as a way to better align marketing and sales thus improving the scalability of your organization:
- Get to “really’ know your customers by understanding the problems their faced with.
- Define KPI-level pains a prospect should be confronted with in order to seek your leadership. (i.e. VP-Sales- not meeting sales target or too high cost-of-sales)
- Map your differentiators and delivered capabilities to those pains.
- You will now be able to create a set of “pain-based segments”
- Plot your segments in terms of size, solution awareness in the market and level of differentiation.
- You will now be able to prioritize your pain-based segments
- Identify the impacted people in their organization as high as possible on the org-chart which could or will be involved in a buying cycle (key-contacts)
- Map above information for each of them and rank them in terms of impact. The most impacted person will become key in your marketing and sales approach
- You should now be able to write a value proposition for each of the targeted segments. This value proposition is the foundation for all buyer-aligned deliverables such as white papers, solution briefs, case studies, product collateral etc.
- Build a sales kit per segment covering the quantified pains, their causes, needed capabilities, quantified results, ideal buying criteria, benefits and unique features per key-contact
- Populate and qualify your database with suspects based on their pains and readiness to buy and launch a lead generation and/or lead nurturing program to start generating qualified leads for sales.
Above will result in an increased focus:
- More engaged employees
- A lower time to productivity as low as 6 to 7 months for complex solutions
- Increased hit-rate up to 75% and more depending on the level of differentiation you can proof
- Decreased cost of sales by at least 22%
Above shows how segmentation can have an important impact in terms of a better sales and marketing alignment.
Write a comment or question to dig deeper into this improved way of segmentation.
